Regrets

Been listening to the McLusky 3 disc compendium all morning long, and its thoroughly fantastic. Disc 3 is the live disc portion, and its making me regret never having gone to see them live. I probably started listening to them when their last album came out, and was surprised when they said they were breaking up.

Lets see if I can come up with a horribly stupid analogy to describe their sound.

Say there are two types of nerds at your highschool. One type of nerd wants so desperately to be liked by the cool kids, but really can't get away from the joys of Super Mario Kart tournaments and how the Infinite Crisis event is going to affect the Justice League as they know it. He goes to the parties, drink a beer or two, but he usually stays huddled in the corner with his quiz bowl teammates. His mother makes excellent brownies. When he goes to college, his look will become retro chic and he'll develop at least the illusion of a backbone. Will probably score with the flighty girl who watched too much MTV in highschool and is convinced she "isn't like those girls."

Now the other nerd has a lock on his bedroom door. He's into loud music that his neighbor lets him borrow, stuff like Big Black and Fear. He bought a pretty decent amp off of the mexicans that run the taco bus near the 7-11. Music is constantly blaring out of his house, mostly to drown out his fat mother and her constant complaining. She hates that neighbor. He and his friends are starting a band next week, even though they've yet to decide which instruments they're going to play. His best friend has some... issues. With voices. And blood. He's not even going to college.

The first nerd is Weezer. The second is McLusky. Born from the same emotional pit but while Rivers tries his best to be the most sheepish dude on the planet, McLusky is satisfied just being smarter than you. And rocking harder than you. And doing more drugs than you. And they might be the most unruly shits from that side of the Atlantic, but they're gonna have you singing "All of your friends are cunts/your mother is a ball point pen freak" by the end of the day.

"Intense Pain"

So after watching the Paris Bachelor finale, I've concluded that that show is perhaps one of the most horrible things entertainment has done to society since its invention.

Basically the Bachelor is the purest, most refined source of emotional crack that could ever possibly be fed to a national audience. Random person A creates "genuine" connections with opposing gender people B C D .... and then makes a choice. Seems pretty innocent on the surface, just a normal extrapolation of the early dating shows and what not.

But man, when that girl got rejected, and got into that car, and then started saying those horrible things... that was like the whole reason those producers put money behind the show. Who gives two shits about Mr. & Mrs. Tennessee when you have this gorgeous girl thoroughly embarassed, reaching the depths of emotional hell while the cameras are pointed at her. Everyone can relish her utter shock and dismay first-hand. And no other show can promise such payoff without scripting it over a number of seasons.

Shit is dangerous.

To Do List

Stuff I want to get in the next month or so:

Castlevania: Lament of Innocence

Big fan of Castlevania, no homo. Heard a lot of good and bad things about it, but I think the bad things are simply lowering the used price of it while the good things will make it a fun game.

Shadow Hearts 3

Finished #2 maybe a month ago, and was pretty satisfied by the experience. And by experience I mean the Man Festival.

One of the best parts of #2 was trekking across European/Japanese history for the quest. Its fun to run into Lawrence of Arabia as you are trying to stop Rasputin from assassinating Princess Anastasia. #3 takes place in America, and supposedly includes Elliot Ness, Al Capone, escaping from Alcatraz and much more.

The quirky fun of the series continues in spirit, even though the cast is new. Instead of gay porn scavenger hunts, trash recycling and wolf fighting, we have calorie-counting (with deadly results), guitar slinging (el mariachi style), and uh trash recycling.

Also: see Drunken Master Large Cat.



Kingdom hearts 2

Played a little of #1, and it was alright, but it was definitely the gimmicks that brought people in to the game. #2 will probably be the same, but the gimmicks this time are right up my alley, i.e. Tron world, Steamboat Willie world.

Polish movie poster art

I want some cool polish, communist era movie posters. They all look great. Hopefully I can find some cheap reproductions. They look like old 80's sci-fi novel covers. Except if you know the movie, the interpretation of the movie by the artist is utterly fascinating.

Definitely want:
1. Alien
2. The Birds
3. Weekend at Bernies
4. Short circuit 2

Gradius V

I need a reason to pull my hair out.

The Dracky is round and flighty

Playing mainly through Dragon Quest VIII and I'm liking it a lot. Very pretty, it feels like cel-shading was invented for this game in mind. I always hated how cel-shading made most games look like "Adventures in Duplo-land," but put a decent character artist (artist, not designer) like Toriyama behind the brush and fantastic looking. I hate that casino game with the slime though.

Dragon warrior/quest is kind of an interesting beast from an American perspective. Enix was the owner of the greatest marketing ploy in the history of videogames, giving Dragon Warrior away for free to Nintendo Power users (which was in turn given away for free with NES systems). I mean, everyone who's at least 20 years old has this game PURELY through that promotion. And they played it. And it was hard. But they beat it. And it was a lot of fun.

So what happened after that? I don't know how successful II and III were but I know that I didn't get them. And neither did many others I talk to. When the SNES came out, Final Fantasy had launched its preemptive attack on the system, but DQ V and VI were nowhere to be seen. Of course, Dragon Quest was outselling Final Fantasy every single time in Japan. DQ VII was an underground hit on the playstation, but is it really a compliment when you have both the Japanese market as well as the ultimate nostalgia factor and can only reach cult status with your games?

I mean there are obvious reasons why Dragon Quest failed in the American market. The game, even at iteration VIII, remains unchanged in its conventions. It was never the prettiest game (other than the battle animations, DQ VII kinda looked like clown vomit), and if not FFVII the FFVIII made pretty the standard for the succesful RPG. I guess enix was never able to develop a brand loyalty for the game. Hopefully DQ VIII fixes that.

Hard drive in my hand

So as part of my new employment experience, I went out and got myself an mp3 player, the iriver h120 to be exact. Wanted something simple that sounded really nice and didn't require any software so i could use it to bring stuff from place to place. Suits those needs really well.

Of course, now I need to put music on the damned thing.

This requires me to go through my entire CD catalogue and pick which albums i'll be bothered to rip and copy and which ones i'll just stash away for a while. It's been a speedy process, I usually get through maybe 4 or 5 albums a day due to me sitting in front of a computer all day at work. Can't really complain about that. Got through a Queens of the Stone Age and DJ Krush album today so far, and it isn't even lunch yet.

Tried out the recording quality with a friend over the weekend, and it worked pretty well when using a stereo mic (the one that came with it). I'm pretty excited to use it for live show recordings.

Christening the blog

The things you do in fits of boredom...

As a personal experiment to keep me writing/entertained throughout my post-collegiate career, I thought I'd try to put up all my little fits of commentary and criticism in one steadily updated document.

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my efforts as I try to keep up with the entirety of personally relevant pop culture. It's kinda like all those other blogs you might read, but more girth and less focused.


I promise: no emotional whining, no political commentary, no philosophical rants (subjective).